Encyclopedia:
The Late Collages
of Dorothea Tanning

Kasmin is thrilled to present its second solo exhibition of work by Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012), concentrating on her late-career collages from the 1980s and 1990s. Celebrating the multidisciplinary spirit of her work, Encyclopedia: The Late Collages of Dorothea Tanning delves into the artist’s universe where literary devices, from humor and irony to paradox and repetition, combine with her personal visual lexicon to inspire, as she once wrote, “Art as metaphor for language.”

The works on view were realized by Tanning in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, during a period when her creative energies were shifting from painting and sculpture to works on paper and more broadly from studio art to writing poetry, fiction, and her memoirs. She had experimented with collage throughout her career and returned to the medium with renewed focus after moving back to the United States in 1980, having lived in France for some 25 years. These collages see Tanning employ techniques developed over six decades—painting, drawing, and cutting and composing paper, including fragments of her own watercolors. She also incorporated pieces of fabric, thereby invoking her soft sculptures of the late 1960s to early 1970s. Juxtaposing organic and suggestive shapes with more familiar imagery such as bicycles, tableware, animals, tumbling nudes, and her own hand, Tanning expands upon themes and the play between figuration and abstraction found in her earlier paintings and sculpture. Pairing her imagery with unexpected and evocative titles, she explores the poetic dimension of her visual art practice.

As the largest and one of the last of Tanning’s collages, Encyclopedia (1990–95), represents a culmination of the artist’s work in this medium, where forms that are both recognizable and unfamiliar appear in a moment of uncertain narrative, whether playful, disastrous, or dreamlike, as they had since her earliest paintings. Tanning’s titles are integral elements that invite the viewer’s interpretation, and Encyclopedia suggests that a single work can encompass a vast range of subjects and sources. In this monumental collage, the artist also demonstrates her mastery of the materials, using pieces of hand-torn tracing paper adhered to a composition of construction paper mounted on Masonite to add texture, dimension, and even a hint of movement to the image while building their delicate layers the way a narrator might build a story. When an early state of Encyclopedia was first exhibited in Tanning’s 1993 retrospective at Malmö Konsthall in Sweden, only four panels were shown; the complete five-panel work is seen here publicly for the first time.

Kasmin wishes to thank The Destina Foundation and The Dorothea Tanning Foundation for their collaboration in organizing this exhibition.

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